in the earlier days of textmate, i was able to send to textmate@lists.macromates.com with a bogus address (trying to avoid spam).
I don't particularly see an exact reason for doing this as the archives do not have normal email addresses listed and relatively good protection against email-collecting bots. Of course, the list does not prevent a human from reading the email and entering it into a spam database but that's the probably with any public archive. It's something we just have to accept.
[snip] would be nice to have a way to send without being subscribed, if you can think of one. a bogus subscription address that's allowed. or a magic text cookie of some sort in the body of the message (probably shouldn't be 'viagra' =).
That's an added step to submission to the list. I don't see a necessary reason for this. Set up a spam filtering account and use it. What I do is have one alias on my domain for all of my email lists which gets bounced through a specific gmail account also created just for this purpose.
[snip]
- abhay
---- Abhay Kumar